Quotes about Curiosity

Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.

Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief.

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things.  Awaken people's curiosity.  It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.  Put there just a spark.  If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.

While we are born with curiosity and wonder and our early years full of the adventure they bring, I know such inherent joys are often lost.  I also know that, being deep within us, their latent glow can be fanned to flame again by awareness and an open mind.

I have no problem with religion, and I grew up with a strong curiosity about spiritual matters, but my searching took me away from church and community worship to the internal journey.  Before my recovery began, I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter.

If you approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size.

Jefferson Street at Halloween made a Grateful Dead concert look like a Quaker fish fry. I wanted to be the curious little cell that moves among all the other little cells and gets to know every last one of them.

Only the curious have something to find.

A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything.

Fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it. As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

I am not myself; I am the potential of myself.

So as I thought about it, the most important "tool" you can have today in business is insatiable curiosity. The minute you lose it, you're dead.

When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower. 'Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose, ' he said, shrugging. 'Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.'

Those who see what's obvious aren't necessarily brighter than others.  They're just more likely to observe that the emperor is naked.  Like children, they see what's actually there.  Their perceptions are less clouded by belief systems, taboos, habits of thought.  One responsibility of management---an important one---is to call attention to the invisible obvious, pointing it out as a child does (sometimes to the embarrassment of adults).  Doing so also requires supporting employees who take that risk, too, and other risks as well.

The best ideas aren't hidden in shadowy recesses.  They're right in front of us, hidden in plain sight.  Innovation seldom depends on discovering obscure or subtle elements but in seeing the obvious with fresh eyes.  This is easier said than done because nothing is as hard to see as what's right before our eyes.  We overlook what we take for granted.  Billions of tea drinkers observed the force of steam escaping from water boiling in a kettle before James Watt realized that this vapor could be converted into energy.

We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race; of the development of the human mind, of intelligent life--we have years and years in the future.  It is our responsibility not to give the answer today as to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and to say: "This is a solution to it all."  Because we will be chained then to the limits of our present imagination.  We will only be able to do those things that we think today are the things to do.  Whereas, if we leave always some room for doubt, some room for discussion, and proceed in a way analogous to the sciences, then this difficulty will not arise.

To decide upon the answer is not scientific.  In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar---ajar only.

...it's the process of losing oneself in the jungle that makes science worth doing.

It boils down to studenthood-in-perpetuity / curiosity-in-perpetuity / applied fanatic restlessness. That is, a belief that life is . . . ONE BIG LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Something mysterious happens to a curious, fully engaged mind -- and it happens as often as not, subconsciously. Strange little sparks are set off, connections made, insights triggered. The results: an exponentially increased ability to tune up / reinvent / WOW-ize today's project at work.

Winston Churchill said that appetite was the most important thing about education. Leadership guru Warren Bennis says he wants to be remembered as 'curious to the end.' David Ogilvy contends that the greatest ad copywriters are marked by an insatiable curiosity 'about every subject under the sun.'

The window offered an antidote: the comforting view of a quiet street.  I reached out to hold this sight but instead touched glass, felt its faint chill.  I pressed harder at the window.  If something so solid could be so easy to see through, I thought, then why weren't people the same way, open to any search, available to anyone's curiosity?

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

What we do, if we are successful, is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination.

History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . .